Ghosts Of Masters Past

What unravels when old masters like van Gogh, da Vinci and Titian meet modern icons like the Speedy, Keepall and Neverfull? Contemporary master artist JEFF KOONS bridges the fine line between art and fashion in his latest collaboration with Louis Vuitton

In a gallery within Jeff Koons’s New York studio down by the old Hudson railyards, a team of young painters are busy working with a calm, silent intensity on a dozen huge canvases that hang on the walls: reproductions of the old masters that will join Koons’s Gazing Ball series. In the midst of this activity sits Jeff Koons himself, examining with discernible pride the five bags that represent the first fruits of his collaboration with Louis Vuitton.

The first series of bags features paintings from your recent Gazing Ball series of paintings, in which you created large-scale reproductions of works by the old masters and displayed them with a mirrored globe—a ‘gazing ball’. Why did this series seem right for your collaboration with Louis Vuitton?